Lenovo brand boost

Lenovo has its work cut out to trump last year’s Gitex appearance during which the hardware giant launched its brand into the Middle East market following its acquisition of IBM’s PC division for around US$1.7 billion at the end of 2004.

Lenovo has its work cut out to trump last year’s Gitex appearance during which the hardware giant launched its brand into the Middle East market following its acquisition of IBM’s PC division for around US$1.7 billion at the end of 2004. But it will certainly try. Lenovo will be flying in an entire team of senior directors to meet with business partners, customers and other industry players at this year’s event to increase the vendor’s profile even further. “By being at Gitex for the second year-running, Lenovo is strengthening its market presence, and using this key regional event as a platform for communicating to the industry, to the channel and most importantly, to customers, the value this company offers through its innovative technologies and best engineered PCs,” explains Imtiaz Ghani, general manager of Lenovo Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan. This year Lenovo’s focus will be on the new models of the Think lines, both the ThinkPad notebooks and ThinkCentre desktops, and the Lenovo 3000 Series, which includes the 3000 N100 , C100 and V100 notebooks and J100 desktop. “We’ve spent the past year since the launch building awareness of the Lenovo brand, and of the quality of Lenovo products — and we want to capitalise on this by introducing the high quality of our products,” Ghani says. Of particular focus to Lenovo, as with all the major PC vendors, is the Saudi Arabian market, and the vendor will be doing everything it can to wow potential customers that make the short journey over from the Kingdom to check out Gitex Saudi Arabia’s big brother. “This year we set up in Saudi, which is a very big market opportunity for Lenovo, so we’re putting a lot of focus on that,” commented Mohamed Sharaf, marketing manager of Lenovo Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan. “Growing and developing the channel, and ensuring the availability of the latest Lenovo products to the Middle East in conjunction with global launches.” Lenovo’s global strategy has a heavy focus on investing in emerging markets.